at the party (because he had a speaking gig) was Shawn Broderick, who manages TechStars Boston. As I reported yesterday, TechStars is hunting for new space for its 2010 session. So Broderick got a Dogpatch desk for himself—and introduced Localytics and other TechStars companies to the idea, which he loves. “I’m really proud of Polaris for stepping up and putting out a great red carpet for smart young companies. It’s really good thing for the community,” he says.
—Another party-goer was Jonathan Hayes, CEO of Media Lab spinout Dinube, a startup seeking to enable people in developing countries who don’t have access to banks to make payments using their cell phones.
— Rajat Suri, founder and CEO of ElaCarte, dropped out of MIT (where he was pursuing his joint PhD and MBA) in January to pursue his vision of making a touch-screen display for restaurant tables, so that guests can order and pay from their seats (and, I guess, so they can’t complain that no one came to take their order!).
–Borya Shakhnovich is CEO of a new company called Orwik that is out to make academic research more accessible to more people. It’s all part of the very interesting Open Access movement.
—Dogpatch will host workshops—open to non-kennel mates—on such subjects as self-service sales models that might be of interest to young companies and entrepreneurs. Its first confab between the SF and Cambridge labs is this coming weekend around the launch of Google Wave. Go to Dogpatch’s blog to stay up to date on their events.
—I saw more Polaris folks in one place than even at the LogMeIn IPO party last month at Fenway Park, including Alan Spoon, Amir Nashat, the aforementioned Dave Barrett, Alan Crane, and Kevin Bitterman. But I didn’t see Dogpatch founding father (and name changer) Mike Hirshland. He might have been in the steam room shedding pounds in his weight-loss race with Bob Metcalfe. (You can follow their twitter streams to stay up on the action: twitter.com/VCMike and twitter.com/BobMetcalfe).
The key takeaway for me was that an incubator/workspace like Dogpatch is a badly needed, and most welcome, addition to the entrepreneurial ecosystem here. Don Dodge of Microsoft posted a neat entry on his blog of “Boston startup events, resources, people you need to know.”
And you can see our list of new entrepreneurial programs that have opened around Boston this year here, every since Y Combinator left town.
Here’s the promised list of the inital Dogpatch residents:
—Russell Cook: previously co-founded beRecruited, an online site for high school
